Part 16 (1/2)

He had to think an instant for this. ”No--not quite to that.”

”To what then?”

He tried in a manner to oblige me. ”To something else.”

It seemed so, for my thought, the gleam of something that fitted, that I was almost afraid of quenching the gleam by pressure. I must then get everything I could from him without asking too much. ”You don't quite know to _what_ else?”

”No--I don't quite know.” But there was a sound in it, this time, that I took as the hint of a wish to know--almost a recognition that I might help him.

I helped him accordingly as I could and, I may add, as far as the positive flutter he had stirred in me suffered. It fitted--it fitted!

”If her change is to something other, I suppose then a change back is not quite the exact name for it.”

”Perhaps not.” I fairly thrilled at his taking the suggestion as if it were an a.s.sistance. ”She isn't at any rate what I thought her yesterday.”

It was amazing into what depths this dropped for me and with what possibilities it mingled. ”I remember what you said of her yesterday.”

I drew him on so that I brought back for him the very words he had used.

”She was so beastly unhappy.” And he used them now visibly not as a remembrance of what he had said, but for the contrast of the fact with what he at present perceived; so that the value this gave for me to what he at present perceived was immense.

”And do you mean that that's gone?”

He hung fire, however, a little as to saying so much what he meant, and while he waited he again looked at me. ”What do _you_ mean? Don't you think so yourself?”

I laid my hand on his arm and held him a moment with a grip that betrayed, I daresay, the effort in me to keep my thoughts together and lose not a thread. It betrayed at once, doubtless, the danger of that failure and the sharp foretaste of success. I remember that with it, absolutely, I struck myself as knowing again the joy of the intellectual mastery of things unamenable, that joy of determining, almost of creating results, which I have already mentioned as an exhilaration attached to some of my plunges of insight. ”It would take long to tell you what I mean.”

The tone of it made him fairly watch me as I had been watching him.

”Well, haven't we got the whole night?”

”Oh, it would take more than the whole night--even if we had it!”

”By which you suggest that we haven't it?”

”No--we haven't it. I want to get away.”

”To go to bed? I thought you were so keen.”

”I _am_ keen. Keen is no word for it. I don't want to go to bed. I want to get away.”

”To leave the house--in the middle of the night?”

”Yes--absurd as it may seem. You excite me too much. You don't know what you do to me.”

He continued to look at me; then he gave a laugh which was not the contradiction, but quite the attestation, of the effect produced on him by my grip. If I had wanted to hold him I held him. It only came to me even that I held him too much. I felt this in fact with the next thing he said. ”If you're too excited, then, to be coherent now, will you tell me to-morrow?”

I took time myself now to relight. Ridiculous as it may sound, I had my nerves to steady; which is a proof, surely, that for real excitement there are no such adventures as intellectual ones. ”Oh, to-morrow I shall be off in s.p.a.ce!”

”Certainly we shall neither of us be here. But can't we arrange, say, to meet in town, or even to go up together in such conditions as will enable us to talk?”

I patted his arm again. ”Thank you for your patience. It's really good of you. Who knows if I shall be alive to-morrow? We _are_ meeting. We _do_ talk.”